Comic Books and The New Literature
The irresistible rise of the yet to be defined areas of Cultural and Popular
Culture Studies, still seen by some critics as “anti-disciplines” prompts the
inevitable question of the definition of our corpus more urgently than ever, for a
discipline that consistently refuses to define its object of study has very little
future and is theoretically not viable.* The risk of seeing Cultural and Popular
Culture studies falling prey to trendy, obscure, and empirically challenged
inquiries is now very real and can only be countered by rigorous, pragmatic
analysis, which will contribute to the elaboration of a viable corpus of study
My intention is to point out some generally accepted canonical fallacies
within the area of literary studies in order to legitimize the composition of a
narrative corpus of popular culture studies, using the medium of comic books as
empirical evidence to demonstrate both the tangibility of our object of study and
the necessity to structure it within a new canonical vision. U.S. comic books are
a privileged corpus of study for Popular Culture scholars for they are currently
in the process of overcoming the limitations inherent to their cultural status, and
hence find themselves at the very heart of the struggle that opposes outdated
canonical conceptions to the necessary revisions that our quickly changing
cultural environment demands. The assimilation of literary studies to cultural
studies, a very tangible reality in our departments of English and Foreign
Languages, provides us with a good point of departure; that is the nature of
literature itself, for cultural studies can be conceived as the most recent mutation
of the literary discipline, and naturally, what happened to literary studies over
time, namely the erasure of their original object of study behind pseudophilosophical speculations, has been at work from the beginning in the field of
cultural studies as a direct heritage from its literary predecessor. It appears,
therefore, urgent to establish some type of theoretical bases for a pragmatic
approach to Popular Culture studies, and our first step must be, naturally, the
definition of our object of study.
In spite of the great diversity of critical approaches to literary and cultural
studies, there seems to be an unspoken consensus when it comes to the un
definition of our object of study: neither traditional historians such as Rene
Welleck or Juan Luis Alborg, nor Marxist critics such as Lucien Goldmann or
Terry Eagleton, nor postmodern cutting edge thinkers and metacritics such as
Jacques Derrida or Jonathan Culler attempt to propose a clear distinction
between what is “literature” and what is not, but rather dismiss, more or less
implicitly, the possibility of such a notion altogether.^ To some, mostly
historians and sociologists, literature is “whatever” any given cultural or
interpretive community at any given time decides to consider as such, while to
others, usually of the postmodern rhetoric persuasion, it is simply
indistinguishable from any other communicative instance, since in the post